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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop posting major system incidents and status pages for major cloud/SaaS providers? What's the point?

Post mortems - TOTALLY fine. But just linking to a specific incident is IMHO not valuable to HN and just takes unwarranted frontpage space.

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I find this valuable.

-Sometimes for conversations about alternatives

-Sometimes for conversations about the product's stability history

-Sometimes just for solidarity in frustration

> -Sometimes for conversations about alternatives

So then submit a post mortem and drive the discussion there. Or alternatively post a "Ask HN" if you're legitimately considering alternatives.

> -Sometimes for conversations about the product's stability history

Which are readily available on those provider's status pages.

> -Sometimes just for solidarity in frustration

Isn't that what Twitter is for? Why should the frontpage be littered with <insert provider here>

My point is this - let's say GH goes down 8x over 2 weeks for 10 minutes each. Should there be 8 posts on the frontpage about GH going down each time? No, there should be ONE, otherwise the valuable discussions you're referring to get lost.

I think it's so people realise it's not just them.

Makes no sense. If you're having issues wouldn't you just go directly to <insert service here>'s status page first? Why HN first?

Because status pages lie.

In many cases the status page of a service is an unreliable indicator (e.g. AWS's) so I find HN / Twitter to be a much better signal that an incident that affects many people is happening.

Status pages are just not reliable unfortunately.

The point is notifying the active community here and discussing the reason(s) and impact of the outage, or in GH's case their regularity I guess

So then write a post that says "Ask HN: What is going on GH's being out X many of days". Otherwise you get 6 posts across weeks with the same discussion.

I can understand your viewpoint but just to offer a counter I always check HN for major outage news when it comes to github/AWS/GCP/Azure. There have often been comments with bits of information as to the cause and remediation efforts.

> bits of information as to the cause and remediation efforts.

That's what post mortems are for. Happy for people to submit those.

Also, why are cause and remediation efforts important to you? If you rely on the service and it goes out, what more are you going to learn here that would help you? Genuine question.

> I always check HN for major outage news when it comes to github/AWS/GCP/Azure

Why not just check those status pages? Or check Twitter? HN seems like a weird place to check for it...

> Also, why are cause and remediation efforts important to you?

Because I have to provide information to others in my company about why X is not doing Y. These bits of information help.

> If you rely on the service and it goes out, what more are you going to learn here that would help you?

Roughly the same answer - though I'm also just actively curious what's going on as well in the moment.

>Why not just check those status pages?

I do. HN often has more information.

>Or check Twitter? HN seems like a weird place to check for it...

I don't want to.

HN is frequently discussing outages before the status page updates...

(I recognize not in this case, but I certainly noticed this outage and checked HN before the status page was updated)

If there was no virtual public space in which to tar and feather shameful technical practices (or at least review them honestly), they would probably be even more prevalent.

I also see these as an excellent learning opportunity. Typically, it is a lesson in managing complexity.

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